Who’s Fault Is It?
One of the rewards of having been a Rabbi in one place for 33 years is that I was able to connect with some children of the congregation, and that connection remained through the years. They call me for their weddings and baby namings. They call me for help in family tragedies or for personal counselling or guidance.
Recently I received an inquiry from a very bright and sensitive adult who grew up with me in the shule who was troubled about the state of the world today. Was it hubris to think that animals were not as important as humans? Why did the world seem to be getting worse and worse with illness, and sufferings and pandemics. Is all this leading up to something not particularly good for mankind? Are we being punished by God for something we have collectively done? Our world is more and more resembling the plagues of the seder night.
This was my response.
On the question of relative value of man versus the creatures of the world your assessment is not at all the Jewish perspective. One of the reasons for the creation story is to teach us how man is superior to the other creatures. Genesis 1:26, “ And God said, ‘let us make man in our image, after our likeness.They shall rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, the whole earth, and all the creeping things that creep on earth.”’…
How else ethically could you justify using animals in drug trials if there was equivalency of all creatures? Being superior doesn’t mean we have a right to torture animals but if that’s what it takes to perfect a cure for Covid it is ethical and moral because we come first.
As for the question of the world getting worse and worse, and this year the worst so far with so may challenges, let us differentiate between nature and God.
God gave us the world and it was our responsibility to join with Him in the ongoing act of creation. Sometimes we discover great things like penicillin and insulin and do great things with it, and sometimes we discover the power of the atom and we do horrible things with it. God gave us the world and we are responsible for the stewardship of it.
The Covid 19 virus is not a punishment from God but a direct consequence of man’s efforts. We intrude on nature’s space with more and bigger cities, and unleash animals that have germs onto other animals they would have never been in contact with in nature. We eat things that are “exotic”, and then bring those microbes into our population.
We heat the atmosphere and disregard the warnings and then we reap super-storms and other forms of global wierding.
We produce enough food to feed the overpopulation that we caused and then distribute it so that the haves take most of it and the have nots have much less. (as a kid I asked how can we say in birkat hamazon, “Hazan et hakol, He feeds everyone”, when obviously people are starving? and I was then taught that the world produced enough nutrition but didn’t distribute it properly).
As for this time period and the suffering etc, this is easy compared to just over 100 years ago. We were in the midst of the war to end all wars, WW1 , which killed 18 million military and civilians and the Spanish Flu pandemic that took another 40 million people at the same time. Now that was a plague of Biblical proportion!
These were not actions of God punishing, anymore then 6 million died as a punishment for anything they might have done to offend God. They died because of the inherent capacity that humans have for evil, but at least let us be honest and leave God out of it.
God’s job was to create a pond and a sailboat and rules for how to play with it. After that He was there to inspire and remind us about the rules of sailing the boat. How successful we were in playing with it was a direct result of how well we followed the guidelines.
I know it is an easy default to look at all the crap going on in the world, all the suffering, all the lack of human leadership and look up and say, “So where are You? If this is the way you want to play, you can take this game and shove it”. But that is because the God we understood in ancient times was the God we needed, or at least understood, but we are not ancients anymore though so many of us are moral primitives, including the resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
We are grown ups in the development of mankind and we realize that God will not intervene in the mess we have made except for the legacy of values and rules He left for us to use.
In the end our plagues are either built into the randomness of nature or enhanced by our deeds to be even more devastating . We pray so we may find the strength to go inside ourselves and act like God wanted us to. That was God’s contribution , the rest is up to us.
I hope we are worthy of the challenge but frankly I wouldn’t bet all my money on it. We have failed too many times in the past. Maybe we need to go from the lessons of Genesis and move onto the book of Exodus and pray a Moses will come along to help us get through this. The world has no problem creating Pharaoh’s, so we will need to create and then discover a Moses for our time. I hope it is soon while we still have what to save.
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